The best reason to diminish social programs is not to put more money in people's pockets but to put more responsibility in people's pockets.
Mark SteynBut, once you get a taste for shutting people up, it's hard to stop. Why bother winning the debate when it's easier to close it down?
Mark SteynLast month, 80,000 Americans signed on to new jobs, but 85,000 Americas signed on for Social Security disability checks. Most of these people are not 'disabled' as that term is generally understood. Rather, it's the U.S. economy that's disabled, and thus Obama incentivizes dependency.
Mark SteynIf you took every single penny that Warren Buffett has, it'd pay for 4-1/2 days of the US government. This tax-the-rich won't work. The problem here is the government is way bigger than even the capacity of the rich to sustain it. The Buffett Rule would raise $3.2 billion a year, and take 514 years just to pay off Obama's 2011 budget deficit.
Mark SteynContemporary politics is all about phony energy, about running around slamming doors for the sake of it-or, more to the point, opening them and tossing through a huge sack of taxpayer dollars.
Mark SteynIn a way, both the U.S. media and those wacky rioters in the Afghan-Pakistani hinterlands are very similar, two highly parochial and monumentally self-absorbed tribes living in isolation from the rest of the world and prone to fanatical irrational indestructible beliefs — not least the notion that you can flush a 950-page book down one of Al Gore's eco-crazed federally mandated low-flush toilets, a claim no editorial bigfoot thought to test for himself in Newsweek's executive washroom.
Mark Steyn